diadem app;

[stations]

Player Information

Player: Em
Contact: paingravy
Invitation OR characters played: Frank Castle, Laura
Are you over 18?: lol


Character Information

Character: Jack Townsend
Canon: Tales from the Gas Station: The Abandoned Zoo Story
Age: approximately 30
History: Link
Possessions:
Weapon: None

Powers/Abilities:

The combination of Jack's initially dormant supernatural aspects, lifelong exposure to a cosmic rift, and his instability manifest in a few weird ways. He's described by Sabine, an entity whose purpose is to be a caretaker for impossible things, as "something which is, but should not be".

His sleep disorder makes him largely immune to being knocked out by any force - be it pain, surgical anesthesia, or a full-blown demi-god trying to render him unconscious. For better or worse, Jack's consciousness can't be blacked out by anything, the deepest he'll go is the lightest possible stage of sleep that still retains some (disoriented) awareness of the world around him. This disorder also impacts the part of his brain that stores and converts memories, and he's demonstrated an immunity to having his memories wiped by several god-like beings. Stupidly and on the complete flipside of this, he sometimes experiences memory loss on his own because of his condition. Pros and cons, I guess.

He has a mild resistance to supernatural compulsion effects, and can generally snap himself out of things like charms after only a few moments of effort. Example: the Fox Lady, an entity that takes on the form of whatever the beholder sees as pure and perfect beauty, then whispers "come with me" in a way that supernaturally hypnotizes people into leaving and joining her in her hearse, never to be seen again. She's quite perturbed when he snaps out of it after a few seconds to be like, "no thank you." The more powerful the entity the longer it takes him to break out, like in the case of the intensely powerful Dark God's compulsion to dig holes behind the gas station. That lasted closer to an hour, compared to the Dark God being able to fully brainwash other ordinary people seemingly indefinitely.

Jack has the ability to see the memories of people in proximity to him. He lives out these memories first-person as if he were them, understanding the basic context and train of thought of the person as they're living their memory. He is especially prone to this if he's under the effects of drugs or alcohol. These memories hit him out of nowhere, he doesn't choose to initiate them and he can't stop them once they start.

He's latently somewhat a little psychic. Sort of. It's complicated and nebulous and we'll almost ceretainly never get a clear explanation.

He is also a super-saturated sponge full of a thousand lifetimes of void-rift energy. This makes him a perfect vessel, or an awesome power battery for anybody that has the ability to harness that energy. Jack himself can do nothing with this power, but other characters in the game may find ways to tap him for it.

His hallucinations occasionally manifest in unexplainable and helpful ways - usually in clutch this-is-it situations, or when he's at peak instability. Objects randomly appearing, or conversations with dead people that may or may not actually be ghosts, are the two primary ways this manifests.

TL;DR he's too crazy even for cryptids & his insanity defies reality a little sometimes. Unfortunately, he can't control pretty much any of it, so it'll be used sparingly as neat thread hooks and for quality shitposting.


Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?

The answer, hands down, is Sabine. She was his childhood friend, then his girlfriend, his partner, his best friend. The one stable constant person he always had, during a lifetime of bouncing around from foster family to foster family. Without her, he never would have known love or kindness. He never would have been dissuaded from violence or an obsession with guns — the time he brought one to show her and she shut him down for it radically changed his views on them at a time when he was incredibly impressionable. He almost certainly would have grown up to perpetuate the cycle of abuse without her in his life — or at the very least, he would have stayed with the family in Texas that wanted to adopt him, rather than coming back to his shitty town just to be with her. He wouldn't have ended up working at the gas station, and without him there to stop a few different world ending events, it's possible the consequences could have been apocalyptic.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?

Content warning: Suicidal Ideation.

After the car accident that put Sabine into a coma, Jack fell into a devastating depression. For as bad as he seems five years later, it's nothing compared to the way he felt in the immediate weeks after the incident. One evening while on shift, Jack pulled out a handgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The only thing that saved him was that same sheer dumb luck in the form of a piece of pocket lint jamming the firing mechanism.

As soon as he pulled the trigger, he hated himself for it. He was absolutely disgusted with himself, to such an extent that he actively repressed the memory. It's later resurfaced after Sabine's death, and with the benefit of hindsight, Jack would have chosen to never, ever even attempt to pull that shit again. It didn't teach him anything, it didn't help him, it didn't fix him. It just made him feel worse, and he'll be ashamed of it for his whole life.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting? How might this impact their ability to adapt and in what ways will they confront this challenge?

Jack's biggest challenge here will be the same one he faces back home — that he's mostly just a Weird Little Guy, and yet is frequently put into situations with circumstances far larger than he should be able to navigate. He can do some weird stuff, but he doesn't have super powers in the traditional sense. He can't really fight with any remarkable skill. He's not a genius. He's just a weird little dude, and what do you mean he's facing down a hoard of zombies all of a sudden?

He'll likely overcome it the same ways he overcomes such situations in canon: a combination of helpful friends, dumb luck, and the strange coalescing of Weirdness that seems to follow him around everywhere and conveniently help him somehow survive the most inconceivable circumstances known to man. (He might also be getting a big ass raccoon as a bonus ac reward, because he needs a guard dog...)

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?

The cosmic weirdness and the horror. He's from an eldritch horror creepypasta satire canon, the things that happen in games are literally just like the events of his daily life. It will take zero effort for him to adapt to this particular brand of weirdness. If it weren't for the absence of his friends, he honestly probably wouldn't even notice that big of a difference between Panorama and any other city he's ever traveled through.


Samples

Sample: Link